Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - They Want to Ban Abortion Info Online

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

How Section 230 Became a Reproductive Rights IssueSupport my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz    🗞️ Substack: https://www.usermag.co    In this episode of my Section 230 mini series, I break down how anti abortion groups are targeting the internet itself. From the 1873 Comstock Act to modern day efforts to repeal Section 230, there is a long history of using censorship laws to suppress reproductive health information. The fight for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy has always been deeply connected to free speech and open access to information online. I sat down with Sarah Phillips from Fight for the Future to uncover the real, hidden agenda behind the push to repeal Section 230.While politicians constantly frame weakening Section 230 as a way to "hold Big Tech accountable," these efforts actually undermine our right to access vital information related to reproductive justice and abortion online. We dive deep into the history of speech law, and talk about where the fight stands today. Here is what we cover in this episode:How early internet censorship efforts were disguised as protecting kids from indecent material.The devastating impact of SESTA/FOSTA and how it led to mass content takedowns of sex education and LGBTQ+ resources.How the narrative of "tech addiction" is being weaponized to pass restrictive internet laws.How anti-abortion extremists are targeting Section 230 to take down abortion funds and restrict out-of-state travel for care.Why protecting Section 230 is vital for shielding secure messaging apps like Signal and Telegram.Speaking out against Big Tech and challenging institutional power is not lucrative, and these videos are entirely self-funded. If you value this content, please support my work so I can continue making this series!!!Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz    🗞️ Substack: https://www.usermag.co    Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz      https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0     https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz https://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social  https://twitter.com/taylorlorenz 

Now they want to go after the two ways that people still access abortion, which is getting abortion pills in the mail, or traveling outside of the state to receive abortion care at a clinic in a state where that's still legal. The fight for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy has always been about free speech and open access to information. Weakening or repealing Section 230 is constantly framed as holding big tech accountable.

But what these reform efforts ultimately do is undermine our right to access information related to sex, reproductive justice, and abortion online. To discuss all of this, I have Sarah Phillips here from Fight for the Future, a digital human rights organization that works to protect free expression online. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me for this episode of my Section 230 mini series. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Longtime listener, first time caller, for sure. I know. I feel like we talk a lot about all of the bad things that are happening and you

guys obviously do amazing work at Fight for the Future. Today I kind of want to like start by diving back in history. Obviously, the issues around sort of women's health content, reproductive justice content are so intertwined with the fight to protect Section 230 and everything that's happening today. But these issues have sort of been intertwined, especially when it comes to speech law, like from hundreds of years ago. Are you familiar with the Comstock Act? I have had to become familiar with the Comstock Act, is how I would put it. So this was a law made back in 1873 that actually made it a federal crime to send obscene material through the mail. And it explicitly named contraceptive information, family planning information, abortion related material as obscene content.

So you couldn't send it through the mail. And basically, you know, for decades, this law was used to prosecute anybody who dared to disseminate information about birth control. family planning abortion through the mail. Margaret Sanger was famously prosecuted under Comstock laws for distributing family planning literature. So I think it's just like when we talk about speech law and we talk about the battle over online speech, like from the jump women's bodily autonomy has been targeted under these like obscenity laws.

Absolutely. I mean, I think reproductive justice advocates largely have been talking about Comstock even in the now. The clear line between reproductive health care, sex ed, the access to contraceptives, et cetera, as you're saying, is very tied to quote unquote decency laws. And we need to like kind of constantly remind people of that. Because I think as you're saying, it can kind of seem like a historical artifact of the 1800s or early 1900s when in actuality it impacts our day-to-day ability to access things now.

Yeah. I think it's interesting also like a hundred years exactly after the Comstock Act passed and these laws were sort of put into fruition in the late 1800s. We had Roe versus Wade passed in the 1970s. We had the sexual liberation. We had, you know, the mass production of birth control, et cetera. And when the internet came into being in the early 1990s, which I guess like, I don't even know if you were alive. I was like a little kid.

So I don't remember. It did predate me. My birth. Okay. God. Oh my God. I was like a tiny child. So I wasn't, you know, engaging in these early mess. boards personally, but I think it's interesting to note that actually on these early web

forums in the early 90s, a lot of content that was being discussed was sex ed content, queer content, women sharing, you know, information related to their pregnancies or birth control, and actually looking for and sharing abortion content online. And so it didn't take very long before these like moral panic groups began to get outraged. Like they found out that, oh, there's this new thing. called the internet. It's a decentralized information system. So it's not regulated the same way that we regulate newspapers or magazines, etc., which at this time we're still pushing like very regressive reactionary kind of messaging to women. It was very misogynistic, the media

environment of the 90s. And so when they saw that women were seeking this information online, getting this information online, and I think what was so important too is like building early internet communities around supporting each other in sort of getting access to this information, they freaked out. And this is what ultimately led to the Communications Decency Act. This Communications Decency Act is actually what Section 230 is part of. I think so much of what people don't understand about the Internet is that it is a valuable resource. Like, I mean, and that sounds so basic, but if you listen to lawmakers and people talking about the Comstock Act and the Internet in general, they are not considerate of these stories of people.

info sharing, doing mutual aid, doing like information gathering and resourcing of communities when there's a lack of access to health care in person. They are not charting these things as good resources from the community. Right-wing actors, like you're saying, view this as a threat to their ability to censor and oppress these communities. Yeah. And so I think, you know, when you look at who was involved in pushing the Communications Decency Act, it was all the same familiar faces that we know and hate today. You had the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, morality and media, aka Nicosi, is what they go by today.

I refuse to use their new name because I think everyone needs to remember their roots. I mean, they're super anti-LGBQ, of course, all that is sort of tied in here. But they're fundamentally against women's rights and, you know, things like birth control abortion and women's health. And so, you know, when these groups went to Congress, and said, hey, there is, I'm sorry to call it, I have to use the Algo speak because we're on YouTube here, but corn on the internet, you know, what they meant by adult material or whatever was actually a lot of really completely legal speech that was just about, you know, abortion information, et cetera. And so you see these sort of issues come up in the earliest days of the communications decency act and the Telecommunications Act. Representative Henry Hyde, who is also known for his 1978 amendment barring the use of, of federal funds for abortion also influenced the Telecommunications Act pretty heavily.

Buried within sort of the act itself alongside Section 230 is a provision that explicitly criminalizes discussing abortion online. And there is potential punishment of up to five years in jail or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, which I think is terrifying that like the Communications Decency Act itself was making this kind of speech criminal. And you know, it was on hold since the Clinton

administration and obviously we had a lot of the communications decency act was struck down, you know, in this landmark case, Reno v. ACLU when it was determined that basically a lot of this stuff was unconstitutional. But a lot of it's still there and could be revived if we dismantle key protections, you know, like section 230. So I just think it's really important for us to remember kind of like where this came from and just like how from the beginning this effort to censor the internet was framed around protecting kids from quote unquote like indecent or obscene a material. Absolutely. And you know, obviously as someone who works directly around free expression, especially around Congress, obviously we're seeing this frame of protect the kids over and over and over

again. I've been explicitly told that by defending Section 230, I don't care about kids, which is like something that I think for both of us is laughable in so many ways because we know that the people saying that are enacting some of the worst policies for kids in other areas. And also fundamentally are actually working in big tax favor by doing something like trying to repeal Section 230. But the larger thing that I think we need to get at here is like you're saying, the intent has always been there around abortion access, around contraceptives, around LGBTQ material and resources.

It is not that these folks are now suddenly in bed with each other because they have this like kind of mutual shared interests now. No, it has always been the intent from the beginning. And I really want people to understand that because what I find over and over again is that we see things like excusing Joseph Gordon Levitt or Amy Schumer or, you know, these kind of like middle of the line liberal organizations that are working with end coasts or morality and media or, you know, pushing the same policies that the Heritage Foundation wants, right?

And it's like, oh, they're just in bed together for this like actually good thing. And it's like, no, this has always been the intent. And they were pushing the same bad stuff that the Heritage Foundation wants. Yeah, I mean, I think back in the 90s, the Heritage Foundation wasn't as involved in the tech policy debate as they are today. I think the tech policy has become so core

and central to the right wing sort of grab for power. But all of these morality groups, I mean, you mentioned Enco's. I always call it Encozy. I don't know how N-C-O-S-E. However you want to pronounce it. Morality of Media. I refuse to call it.

It is morality in media forever. And they, you know, they played a really big role in the communication. Decency Act, as did focus on the family, as did these other far-right, really hardcore religious fundamentalist groups. And even after Reno v. ACLU in 1997, which again was that really famous Supreme Court case that struck down a lot of the indecency provisions and ruled them as unconstitutional in the Communications Decency Act, even after that, they really continued this political project of protecting the kids, aka mass censoring reproductive women's health information online.

And a lot of this also just bled into like any sort of feminist content. And you saw this really come to fruition in the 2000. So as social media took hold in and socializations were from the internet move to things like AIM and forums to these bigger platforms, these far right religious fundamentalist groups were in there, you know, reaching out to these platforms trying to shape their policies very early, arguing from the jump that, you know, speech about reproductive justice should be suppressed. and basically that sexual content should be regulated and censored on these platforms in line with dangerous content. I also think it's like interesting that Facebook was one of the early kind of like cavers to these groups

because even just the way that Facebook was positioned was that it was this like less sexualized, less sort of obscene version of social media that was inherently more like, I mean, it eventually became family friendly. Obviously they expanded it, but it was like safe for. kids to be on. It was targeted to college students, but it wasn't like MySpace, you know, where girls were wearing bikinis and had crazy hair and there was like all of this sort of sexual expression happening on there. It was very much like, here's your more like sort of sanitized social network where, you know, you can meet your classmates and it's safe for kids. And then I guess we saw, you know, the rise of the 2010s, like Instagram launches in 2010, Pinterest launches in 2011. This is when we see the rise of like

the app world, the app ecosystem. Everybody. is like drinking the big tech Kool-Aid. It's under Obama. There's so much optimism. Everybody loves technology. And, you know, I don't want to act like there wasn't any pushback throughout this time. S-workers, sorry, I have to use Algo speak again, were sounding the alarm. These other marginalized groups were starting to say, like, hey, I think it's really weird, for instance, that meta-censors female nipples and not male. There was the whole like free the nipple movement. Also, there was just people that were trying to share, you know, abortion information. and it was getting seemingly downranked or harder to find.

Now, it wasn't anything like the mass censorship that we're experiencing now, but there were these like early warning signs. And I think that these groups were able to kind of quietly like work in the background and start building their message. I will say like until 2016, they didn't get any traction. Like they were out, they would cut, you know, these fundamentalist groups would go and they would try to like meet with these people and say like, oh, this is why you need to censor this and this why you need to censor this.

And like most of the internet companies responded by being like, no, seems fine. We're in like body positivity land now. Like we want, you know, abortion. Like I mean, it's interesting. Like we're talking about Amy Schumer. She ultimately becomes the face of, you know, Section 230 reform, aka revoking. Like this was like the girl boss feminism era as well, where it was like you can control your reproductive health.

Like, you know, you can maybe get birth control now from an online pharmacy. Like isn't tech great. It's actually liberating for women to start. of like see this sort of tech optimism come to fruition. And then of course, 2016 happens. Donald Trump is elected. And this is when we start to see the beginning of the tech lash. For people that don't know, this was like such a big moment in tech reporting culture.

And I do think it's ultimately like I pitched a piece on it a while ago where it's like, I think this was the most pivotal sort of moment in like our recent cultural history that's like never really gone like, gone like reexamined. like we should have like long form pieces examining, you know, the effects of the tech lash, because I think it's like we're suffering through it now. But basically, Donald Trump is elected. Brexit happens. You know, 2016 is also when algorithmic feeds start to roll out en masse. Twitter gets algorithmic feeds. Instagram gets algorithmic feeds is the beginning of the algorithmic internet, musically launches. So you start to sort of like see this shift happening. And people basically were like, okay, super tech boosterism that we saw during the Obama years is all wrong. And tech is

actually bad. Tech is actually bad for the world. Social media is bad for the world. And they really started to associate the negative news that they were receiving about Donald Trump and all the negative news that we were getting about the world, like all of us losing our fundamental rights, with the platforms that they were reading it on. So they would be like doom scrolling, Twitter. And they start to sort of fall for these like social media addiction narratives. Now this had sort of again been percolating like Tristan Harris founded the Center for Humane Technology three or four years prior to that. Like you had these people arguing that like, you know, Snapchat was destroying the youth. Do you remember the Snapchat moral panic? Yes. Yeah. I mean, just to like date myself in this

timeline, like I graduated from high school in 2016. And I remember, you know, parents of like my friends, my friends, even teachers kind of like constantly pervaying this message that to be online was to put yourself in danger and that anything that happened online should be suspect, basically. and that it should be something that you stay away from rather than it being any sort of like resource or like good for you. And I think that I just wanted to mention like my age and that is that because those folks were getting that messaging and now are kind of in this ecosystem of like what you're talking about with like tech lash and like how we're like experiencing the consequences of it. When you're talking about that backlash, especially to the YouTube challenges and all that, that was really 2017 and on. That's when we saw the TidePod challenge, right, which was a fake thing. No teens reading Tidepods.

But you had a lot of panics about this. I mean, this is the precursor to all the TikTok challenges, whereas the YouTube challenges. And kids are dying because they're watching deadly YouTube videos. And if your kid watches the wrong YouTube videos, they're going to kill themselves. And, you know, all of this sort of moral panic nonsense that was, of course, not true. But it started to really take hold, I think, because, again, Donald Trump's election and, like, were we drinking way too much Kool-Aid in the Obama years? Yes. Like, the tech, you know, sort of landscape had not been in.

shitified yet. These tech companies were never good actors, but there was too much optimism. We should have had more criticism from the jump, but people flipped so aggressively to the opposite. And it was this kind of scary stuff. It was this idea of like, hold on, suddenly the internet just put an authoritarian in office. The internet just made Britain leave the EU. The internet, quote, unquote, is responsible for all this bad stuff in the world. Maybe it's bad. Maybe it's also going to destroy the lives of our children. And so much of that was tied in with reproductive justice and freedom. I mean, obviously, 2015 is when gay marriage has passed, but like we had, I think the girl boss sort of feminism of the Obama era was also intertwined

with a lot of reproductive justice. And you started to see women talk about like freezing their eggs or, you know, delaying families and be shout your abortion and all this stuff. So when parents suddenly started to get freaked out about the internet, you had morality and media, which should conveniently rebranded in 2015. You had like all of these other groups rush in and say, yes, yes, yes. Actually, the internet is really bad. It is going to kill your children and it is really dangerous and you need to keep them off. And it's like, well, you guys only want kids off the internet because you think that they're

going to learn about the concept of a family planning and not, you know, have their child when they're 13 years old. But you know, these groups were accepted as you mentioned by like liberal parents who really mainstreamed this moral panic. I think a lot of this kind of easily percolates as you're talking about from the way that conservative, like, parenting media talks about outside influence on your children. And that's something that I grew up with, like, very clear.

Like, I grew up in like, very conservative Texas. Like, there was a narrative that like going to the movies, watching TV, watching Disney Channel, like any sort of like media that was not coming directly from the church and groups like this was a, like, violent influence on your child. So I think like for folks who come out of those kinds of spaces, you can more clearly chart how similar this rhetoric is across the political spectrum when it comes to tech and social media, etc. And like, I think that that what you're talking about that flip in 2016 was really seeing, like, you know, people that you think like would kind of have more common sense about a moral

panic kind of like caving to the Kool-Aid, even though that for a lot of us, like, the origin point was like very clear. Yeah. And I think this just goes back to the fact that all of this stuff is being mainstream for liberals. The fundamentalist conservative Christians like always had those beliefs, but liberals start to really buy into it after the Trump election. And I think, you know, into the beginnings of this nascent moral panic, you have these groups just like so excited to finally get traction, so excited they're finally getting the media to push this like scare content, right? I mean, I did a big piece for The Atlantic in 2018 on online bullying on Instagram. And I don't regret the piece. I think the piece was accurate. But the way that it's been used for censorship is

absolutely deranged. It's interesting, like, as a journalist in sort of seeing your own work become part of this machine, very quickly, that story was being cited in these lawsuits, in these censorship efforts saying, look at the bullying. And actually, you know, one thing that I wish I had included in that piece is that every single person I interviewed still had a very positive view. It was so grateful for Instagram. Was like, yes, I'm getting bullied. Yes, I wish I had more user controls. But Instagram is a fundamental good in my life. But it didn't matter because at that time, especially if you were working the mainstream media as I was at the Atlantic or the New York Times or, you know, eventually the Washington Post, like writing those stories would get you attention. Writing those stories wins you awards. You get lauded. It's like, wow, you're so brave to stand up to the big, bad tech companies.

And you're like, well, all I did is interview like a couple users that like, frankly don't have the norm experience on these apps. And I quoted them. Like, that's it. I'm actually not really doing that much. Or, you know, the Center for Countering Digital Hate that's like one of these organizing censorship groups. reaches out and it's like, here, we've done all the research for you on how evil and bad, you know, things are happening on this platform. You write it up and you're like, well, sure, that's easy enough. And you write it up. And then like, yeah, before you know what your editors are like, so brave. You know, thanks for sharing this. And then your work is being used in these legal cases. And it really strips the nuance of all of it. And as soon as they start to see this like brief window

opening with the moral panic, they're like, okay, now it's time to take down section 230. Now it's time to take down section 230. It's the thing that we've been trying to do since the 90s. finally we're seeing liberal parents start to turn on technology, start to buy into these fake narratives about social media addiction and, you know, online harms and stuff. And we don't actually even care about any of that. Obviously, no that stuff is real, you know, in any more than, you know, kids are being addicted to watching rugrats, which is not, you know,

which is secular content, which is evil or something. But they use this to push these, these two laws called foster sesta. One is in the House. One is in the Senate. It's fight online sex trafficking act. And I always forget the other acronym. But anyway, they're both against S trafficking. Allegedly what they ultimately do is not only punish S workers, as I covered in my last episode of the Section 230 miniseries,

but target a lot of reproductive justice content. With Sesta Fasta, I think the biggest example that it shows for us is that legislation around tech is not what the law says. It is about how the companies will act when presented with that policy. Right? And so, you know, we had, as this law was coming down, advocates, S-workers, reproductive justice groups, fight for the future, free expression advocates saying over and over and over and over again, Sesta Fasta is a censorship law and will lead to mass takedowns of important communities online. That was said over and over and over again. The architects of Sestafasta largely ignored these issues in favor of passing something that would get them like a

political pat on the back and that they'd be able to campaign on, frankly. But what actually happened was that before the law was even enforced, and I say that explicitly, right? Before the enforcement date even came down, you were seeing mass takedowns of communities online. I bring up Tumblr as the specific example. Like, as a teenager online, we called this the Tumblr corn ban. And I think it's actually like interesting to like think about how we talked about it online, because I don't think I had a politics around Sesta Fasta, but I understood the impact because I was experiencing it real time. And this led to massive content take down. And that content looked like sex education. It looked like LGBTQ resources. It looked like abortion information. It looked like

communities online that were talking about harm reduction for S workers, like harm reduction around sexual health, like so many important communities that have always, right, as we covered in the beginning, been looped into what we consider indecent as the United States, right? Yeah. I mean, what Sestafasa did is it was the first carve out to Section 230 and again, covered this all in the last episode, but it created this new sort of liability structure so that anything related to S trafficking could be taken down. And of course, that is a lot of, yes, LGBTQ content.

And I'm getting into that in a whole other episode as well on LGBTQ content and section 230, but reproductive health content, women's health content. Any sort of information about women's bodies was deemed as, you know, potentially obscene and related to S trafficking. And even just women expressing themselves, you know, in their own body. It's like we saw so many women censored during this time and so much content. As you mentioned, you know, before the law even went to effect, pre-censored. Really all information about kind of adults' content, not just like S-worker stuff, but just like stuff about women's bodies was stigmatized and deplatformed.

And this was the goal. Like these organizations celebrated this. This is what they want. This is their ultimate goal. And all these stupid parents, liberals and leftists even, although not that many leftists back then they were basically ignoring it. But, you know, there were some, right, that we're pushing this moral panic and that we're saying, well, you know, I know that it's not perfect, but we have to do something about

the internet. the big, scary, addictive, problematic internet. And I think this is also when we need to talk about the concept of corn addiction, which a big way that they've been able to censor content on the internet is claim that essentially these, you know, these platforms are providing never-ending feeds of adult videos and adult content. And that's what Tumblr ultimately was, right? Of course it wasn't that. But they take these people and they say, you know, we'll look at this, you know,

Tumblr or whatever platform got my child addicted to corn. he can never have a normal relationship ever again because he's addicted to corn. And I just want to stop and say that this is not a real thing. Media addiction, and I know people come from me every time I say it, is not a thing. Just the way you cannot be addicted to music, you cannot be addicted to reading novels, you cannot be addicted to looking at, you know, pictures of hot women online. It's not a thing. And we know as well from research that says that the majority of people that identify as having a corn addiction

actually have completely normal use of cornographic material, but they stigmatize it so heavily within themselves that they believe themselves to be addicted. And so these narratives about addiction, and we see this as well with social media, where there was that great study from Caltech saying that actually, I think it was like 80% of people believe or some obscene amount of people actually believe themselves

to be addicted, they're not. But that's what these groups want, right? That's the messaging that they're pushing. They're like, you're helpless, you're helpless in the face of Tumblr, which is shoving all these images in front of you, we need to pass, you know, we need to remove Section 230 protections from Tumblr because otherwise they're going to turn you into a, you know, a corn addict and you'll never get married and settle down at the age of 18 like you're supposed to.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is, again, I feel like I have to go back to my, you know, conservative Texas upbringing over and over again because I really feel the need to say like over and over again, as you're saying that, like, the corn addiction stuff, like, growing up in a conservative community in Texas, this was something that you were told kind of constantly is that any sort of normal exploration of sexuality was an addiction, was a problem, was something that you needed to constantly force back. And parents were told that they should view any sort of healthy exploration of sexuality as something that needed to be treated as, like, a mental health issue. And that's where you kind of get into this. They're addicted to corn.

Like, you know, this is like a gateway to all this stuff. They're getting it from the internet because they can't be getting it from the religious, like the religious media that I'm shoving down their throat every day, right? Why would they even think about this? And so I think like that's one of those things where it's like, again, you can very clearly see the through line between, you know, this kind of like very conservative sense of like what a healthy sexuality is. And, you know, a lot of this is abstinence-only education for the internet, right? Like that's how I frame it over and over again. Like working on reproductive justice in Texas as a young person, you know, I was constantly having to combat this like narrative about one, sexuality and protecting yourself, etc., but also on top of it, this like deeply held stigma that any exploration was a problem and that it needed to be combated.

And this kind of narrative is held up by a lot of these conservative groups and, you know, being told to parents that there's something I need to interrupt. And social media is the easy scapegoat. Yeah. And I think once Sessa Phosphopast, there's blood in the water. They're like, okay, we're. we can start chipping away at this and they start to do more attempts at carve outs to section 230. There's been multiple proposals to condition or remove section 230 protections in the name of preventing us content, preventing, you know, explicit content, et cetera, adult content. And this has led to this this, this masty platforming of sex education materials and content. In 2020, the pandemic happens.

Everybody is shoved online. kids are getting more and more information online. It's kind of this like rebirth of the internet. Like everyone becomes extremely online, including parents. And actually 2020 was like pretty good. We didn't see a lot of these reactionary internet laws. Like 2020 was this like brief moment where I think like people were kind of distracted about other things. But as soon as Joe Biden gets into office in 2021 and starts stigmatizing the internet saying everybody get back like being online is really bad.

Like everybody needs to get offline. Everybody needs to be back in person, et cetera, et cetera. You see the moral panic once again ensue. And people start to conflate their sort of trauma that they have with the early days of the pandemic with being online. And they start being more and more susceptible to these narratives, this idea that the internet warped to destroy everyone's brains. It's like, actually, no, 2020. We had like kind of record social justice policies. Like there were a lot of good stuff that happened that year, actually.

But these groups start to get power again. And, you know, 2022 obviously is the Dobbs decision that overturns Rovers Weaves. And immediately in this sort of post-Dob's era, you see these efforts to use liability threats and these ideas of aiding and abetting, you know, abortion through online content, be used to nasty platform activists, women's health educators, et cetera. And you see a lot of state laws attempting to chill abortion speech. They're threatening platforms. They're threatening payment processors. They're threatening the app store. and all of these legal scholars continue to explicitly point to Section 230 as kind of this like

crucial protection that they can fight against. I mean, the reason that some of these more aggressive censorship laws have failed in certain states is thanks to Section 230. And because it, again, it like reduces the cost of these meritless lawsuits. And so I think like Section 230 once again is suddenly in the public eye and is being villainized. I think one of the biggest examples of how Section 230 actually like explicitly protects abortion content online is around abortion funds. The National Right to Life Committee and anti-abortion extremists across the country are actually so frustrated that they cannot take abortion fund websites down and that abortion funds in Texas have Instagram accounts that they can fundraise off of. They in like the Texas legislature, for example, hate this.

They explicitly go after every two years the ability of abortion funds to do their work. And if you live in the South and you need to get an abortion, an abortion fund is the way to go. They are the way that you either leave the state, they are the way that you might get connected to resources to get abortion pills in the mail, which many, many people need right now and is legal in the United States. Regardless of what right-wing extremists want to say about it, the National Right to Life Committee has really model legislation that would make internet providers actually liable for hosting abortion fund websites. And this is the blueprint.

This is what they want to do across the board. They want to be able to take down information not just on social media platforms, but websites in general. This model legislation has not gone anywhere yet in the sense that it's been introduced in a couple of state houses. It got a little bit further in Texas last session, but it's the signals, right? It's like they're signaling that this is the next avenue for them. They've had a lot of success in abortion bans in the South and in right-wing states.

Now they want to go after the two ways that people still access abortion, which is getting abortion pills in the mail or traveling outside of the state to receive abortion care at a clinic in a state where that's still legal. I think it's so important for people to understand this. Like we always talk about Section 230 in the context of social media because that is how a lot of people understand it. And it is what, you know, very core to the conversation around social media. But section 230 is so important because most of what section 230 protects is actually not social media. It's the internet service providers, as you mentioned, like the actual comp you serve and

prodigy. People forget this, the two cases that led to section 230 were about internet service providers like Verizon, right, or like these big sort of telecom companies. It protects the hosting platforms that host these websites that allow. them to exist, name cheap, etc. And it protects websites themselves. It protects forums. It protects text messaging and chat groups. It protects platforms like telegram and signal. I think a lot of people don't realize that like all of this is happening over the internet, right? Like aside from SMS text messaging, which most people don't really engage with, maybe if you have an Android sometimes, but even then, a lot of those people are using WhatsApp. Most messaging products are internet service

platforms messaging products as a whole fall under section 230 protections. And so, you know, you mentioned that these abortion funds, I also think of a lot of these signal groups for activists helping people get abortion or doing work around reproductive justice. Part of the reason they want to chip away at section 230 is to censor that speech and regulate that speech. And people need to understand that like the underlying motive, this anti-women, anti-choice, anti any real rights for women like those are the people that are that are underlying this whole effort to dismantle section 230 and as you said earlier sarah i thought you said it really well like it's not like oh wow for huaha so funny i i happen to be on the side of the heritage foundation on this issue i guess

they're doing great work no you have fallen for a fundamentally reactionary far right political effort that's ultimate goal is to you know remove women's autonomy from the internet and prevent them from getting any information about abortion or sexual health or just learn about their bodies online. Yeah, and it's a double-edged sword where the companies that are big enough to survive a repeal of Section 230 are some of the worst censors of abortion information because they care most about their bottom line. So you're left with the big tech companies that will censor the abortion information and the tools like signal that we actually use for information, resource gathering, et cetera, being not able to survive a repeat. is Section 230.

And I think that a lot of the folks in this conversation, like you said, the folks that are like, oh, I'm well meeting. I just happened to be in bed with the Heritage Foundation. Talk a lot about, quote, unquote, we'll just repeal it and then pass something else. Literally it would be like being like, we are going to repeal the Civil Rights Act because I disagree with sort of like one little niche part of it. So I think we should repeal the entire Civil Rights Act and pass a better one under the Trump administration with the Republican Congress.

You are delusional. Section 230 is crucial. And by the way, it's working as intended. And I think that's what is just so harmful about these ideas where they very quickly realized that like total repeal was more politically toxic than reform. And so they constantly talk about reform. But look at Fasta Sesta and how reform goes. Yeah.

I mean, Sesta Fasta is a provably failed policy. It hasn't resulted in the things that the architects have like have said would come true. Well, I think the fact that they claim that it was cracking down on big tech is the most hilarious thing. Because again, as I've asked every single time in all these videos, is meta and Google more or less powerful now than when Sesta Fasta passed in 2018? Did Sesta Fasta meaningfully curb meta and Google's power? Of course not.

It only allowed them to consolidate power further. And as you said, these are some of the most censorious platforms. This is why we have to say the word corn, this whole thing. And probably if you're listening to this on a podcast platform, like it might sound weird that we have to talk around a lot of this stuff, but that's because we're operating on these platforms where this video itself is undeniably going to get flagged and downranked and potentially demonetized.

Right. I think as we've kind of like talked about, you know, around abortion censorship, around what, you know, conservatives want to be able to do around abortion fund websites, et cetera. It is exactly what they want to happen. And the example that I also want to bring it to bring to the table is age verification or what we're calling online ideas. checks, just because I think that it has a similar effect here where the architects of Sesta

Fosta, folks who want to repeal Section 230, people who are pushing age verification mandates will say, oh, well, we should just pass this and see what happens, right? Because their intent is always to shut down S worker communities to censor abortion information. They don't care if good information gets shut down because the intent is always there to censor this information in the first place. And so that's why their first instinct is to say, oh, we'll just do this and see what happens and then go from there because they don't actually care about the communities that get taken down in the process. Exactly what happened with Sesta Fasta. And that's why we keep bringing it up because it's like,

we have this tangible example of what would happen. And, you know, no one that passed Sesta Fasta has said like, oh, I regret doing that. Let's repeal it, even though that's what should happen. I think we should put these people on trial because they're all terrible and guilty. One thing I think a lot of people don't realize about Section 230 as well is that it protects things like Google Maps. There was all this controversy over Google Maps and these crisis pregnancy centers actually coming up in search results

above abortion clinics where, you know, basically people were being guided to go to these like evangelical anti-abortion places when they thought that they were going to go get actual women's health care. It goes back to Section 230. Any user-generated content, any information on any digital platform is being protected

by Section 230. So you might have a lot of problems with social media. You might not agree. You might think that social media is, you know, an addicting hellhole that's going to lead you to consuming nonstop corn, whatever. Do you think that that means abortion providers should be removed from Google Maps? Do you think that that means that, you know, like women's health websites should be taken down? Like, surely, hopefully not, especially if you're listening to this podcast. So like, I think people need to think a little bit more broadly about the consequences of their actions. And just because you don't like this one niche thing, there are so many

things that we can do to crack down on big tech. There are so many ways we could regulate big tech and actually protect people's privacy instead of mass surveillance because we know as well that meta will happily work with the government to target reproductive justice activists. I mean, meta shared private messages that a woman Facebook message someone else seeking an abortion, you know, in a criminal case against her. And that is what meta will do. That is what Google will do.

That is what these platforms will do. They do not care about protecting women or trans people or LGBT. They don't care about protecting any human rights, essentially. And I think the fight for abortion access and reproductive justice content in general is so intertwined with Section 230 and protecting Section 230. Yeah. And one thing I really want to stress is that if you don't have a good handle or understanding of how people are actually accessing abortion in the United States right now, you might not fully understand this. I think that a lot of folks are maybe still living in states where they can just, you know, go to a Planned Parenthood and expect that they can access abortion care.

Obviously, again, I live in Texas. That has not been the norm for a very long time for us, even before Roe fell because of SB8 and because of clinics closing and, you know, like a lot of my friends lived in what we termed abortion deserts in Texas, like long before this, right? And so if you don't understand that like, like, if we're talking about like protecting kids, for example, I'm thinking about the 14. 13, 13, 15, 16, 17 year old living in Texas who might need an abortion and is going to be confronted with an internet where the information that they need does not exist because

Section 230 was repealed. If you want to help children, we need to address their material needs, right? The things that they are thinking about are healthcare, housing, their parents being able to pay rent, being able to have a job after they graduate. So many things that are going to expect, like, actually impact. their material reality. And what we're seeing is, frankly, condescending narratives from lawmakers or the people who can afford to fly to Congress or to D.C. every two weeks to lobby on tech policy saying that this is what's going to, you know, protect kids. And also, frankly, like,

I think parents being sold a lie on what will protect their kids. You know, there's a lot of conversation in this about kids, what needs to be done for them and not a lot of listening to young people on like what is actually impacting them. And then also, again, this exploitative nature of saying, you know, if you care about your kids, you want to censor the internet. But that's not true, right? Like, caring about your kids is not censoring the internet. You bring up such a good point of the amount of money that goes into it. Like these advocates, these parents, these concerned parents whose child was addicted to corn and these parents that travel to D.C. and present these like weepy tales of their child or whatever.

are often Christian fundamentalists are tied to Christian fundamentalists have ties to anti-abortion groups. You know, the groups that fund this entire reactionary political movement either have their funding completely obscured or we know have ties to either big tech or the far right. I mean, the Heritage Foundation obviously is very involved. Morality and media is extremely involved. They're the ones boosting all this stuff. They're the ones that have social media managers. So when Joseph Gordon Levitt gets up on stage and says, I want to see a section. 30 repeal, you know, voted 100 to zero.

They can clip that. They can blast it out. They can reframe that. They can use this stuff to promote their messaging. Some 14 year old who just found out that she was pregnant in Texas or in some other, you know, state with more authoritarian laws. They can't counter that. They don't have.

They're, they're not even in a position to counter this massive, powerful political messaging machine and people like Jonathan Haidt, who again, Heritage Foundation collaborator, author of The Anxious Generation, who has pushed. hugely misogynistic, you know, content about women, hugely regressive content about women. He's funded. He's got millions and millions and millions of dollars and he's being funded by all of these horrible organizations. People like him are the ones that the media is giving a platform to.

And the New York Times and, you know, all of these other mainstream media outlets, they're not speaking to the actual people harmed by these policies. They're not talking about the fact that the entire movement to repeal Section 230 was born out of virulent, you know, anti-LGBQ hate and anti-reproductive justice, anti-women's rights, anti, you know, basically Christian fundamentalism. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. All right.

That's it for this week's episode of my Section 230 mini-series. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter on usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I send a biweekly roundup of everything that I'm reading and following online. You can also get my newsletter on my Patreon where I do bonus content, a monthly Q&A live stream, and more. This Section 230 series is entirely self-funded. I have zero advertisers backing it, absolutely zero.

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